So, I was on X yesterday and I saw a guy with 25 years of programming experience saying, “Please help me, I need a job, or I’m going to have to move the family into the car with my three-year-old child.” This is one of a number of such posts. They’re flooding LinkedIn, and now they’re going to X. Something is happening where people who are highly qualified from a technical standpoint can’t get jobs.

At the same time, technical employers are saying they can’t find qualified candidates. It seems to me that the problem is a fundamental mismatch causing a ripple effect. The mismatch is that employers think an employee must have the exact skills they need immediately.

The reality is that most skills can be picked up—unless, of course, you’re a surgeon. Most skills can be learned by someone who is intelligent, thinks critically, works hard, and has integrity. You don’t want people in your workplace who lack integrity, obviously. The narrow-mindedness we are seeing is related to a lack of ability to think critically and take risks to move forward.

If you are stuck in this mechanistic way of thinking, you aren’t going to want to bring someone in unless you know for a thousand percent that they are going to make your business better. Tied to this is a panic-driven attitude regarding what potential employees might have on their social media if they aren’t 100% perfect. Again, they get knocked off the list. Everyone has a past; if you knock everyone off the list, you won’t have a candidate pool.

If we don’t stop this ripple effect—if we don’t start thinking broadly about who is worth hiring and who is worth giving a chance—we are failing to allow people to be human. What will happen is an increasingly wide gulf between the super-rich, who don’t have to care about anything, and the working poor, who are one step away from poverty. You are going to have a population that can no longer survive the status quo.

That is a population that will be ripe for radicalization. We do not want that. So, America, let’s get people back to work.